The Mystery of the Capriccio Papers

by Lucy Beckett (February 2012)

The aforementioned Gordon Marino has written an excellent introduction on the website of the Kierkegaard Library in Minnesota (just google the names), and this was helpful to me in finding my way around a truly extraordinary character, but I actually had the privilege of meeting David Wemyss at the Edinburgh Festival last year.

Capriccio

I think all four works were written by the same person: one David Evans, whom I knew briefly in Norwich in the summer of 2002. It is said that he moved to Edinburgh in Scotland a year or so later, but my attempts to trace him there ended in failure. He seems to have disappeared from the face of the earth. If he is still alive, he would now be very old.

They remembered him with fairly mixed views: kindly, aloof, witty, awkward. A fantasist, even a Walter Mitty type, someone said, but I never got any explanation of the kind of fantasy he might have gone in for. He was very fond of classical music, but went to concerts alone. All in all, he seemed like one of those intensely private individuals whom one would take to be unmarried and childless, possibly homosexual.

Of course I googled the names Carole Wilding, Victoria Cartmel, Helen Samuels and Richard Salisbury, but nothing interesting came of it. They were pseudonyms, all right. But did that mean the real author was the person who had possessed the floppy disk? David Evans had been an appositely enigmatic character, but, in truth, the author could have been anyone really. Even more apposite was the idea that he had become irretrievably unknowable.

Unlike her mother, Claire was very taken with her find. She had been trying out people like Knut Hamsun and Kafka and Proust, and was susceptible to the idea that mysterious existential tracts of some sort had been found by her. Much more importantly, but unknown to me at that time, the paper by Victoria Cartmel had rippled through her being.

Later, though, I stumbled on a radio programme about Kierkegaard, which was how I heard about his penchant for pseudonyms and literary puzzles. So maybe the tutorial idea was fanciful. Anyway, Claire and I started our own little tutorial group, which annoyed Jane.

In the six years since all this happened, Claire has turned into an enigmatically original thinker, but yet, if this makes sense, an unintellectual thinker. Nowadays she is likelier to have her nose in Jane Austen than in Kierkegaard or Wittgenstein, although the Four Quartets go with her wherever she is. And she has always remained loyal to the essays of Messrs. Wilding, Cartmel, Samuels and Salisbury, not only because they got her round a corner in her life but also because, once she had turned it, she preferred them to most of what she then encountered at university.

In fact I sometimes think that Claire and Marie are out of sympathy with any thinkable polis at all, and that it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that they could sometimes be located outside conventional probity.

Now it has to be said that the girls have read an awful lot of twentieth century literature that has simply passed me by, but I like to think nevertheless that they enjoy my company, and that I do occasionally interest them with remembered snippets from a strong classical education.

Even in familiar and humdrum conversation all the opinions which are generally expressed with ease and sleep-walking assurance became so doubtful that I had to cease taking part in such talk. My mind compelled me to view all things occurring in speech from an uncanny closeness, just as once, through a magnifying glass, I had seen a piece of skin on my little finger look like a field full of holes and furrows.

And the Capriccio papers reinforce the feeling that these incongruities are such that admitting defeat is the only step on the road to recovery. Equally important, however, is the understanding that admitting defeat is something that must be accomplished individually. Anyone for whom this means anything will be confronting idiolectical peculiarites from which no common principle can be drawn. But read on! Family resemblances can yet be discerned. And surprising motions of the heart may be just a page or two away.

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